Grammatology of Images : A History of the A-Visible

__Grammatology of Images__ radically alters how we approach images by asking after imaging as such. How does something a-visible get transformed into an image? The book illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between religion and science, and between things that are and are not understood as art. A new account of the nature of images in relation to cultural history and to philosophy. "Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida's and Freud's concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel's approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art"-- Provided by publisher CONTENTS 5 Note to the English-Language Edition 7 List of Figures 9 Introduction: Toward a Grammatology of Images 15 1 The Trace and the Current Revaluation of Lines 29 2 Faces: Between Trace and Image, Encoding and Measurement 57 3 Indexical Images: Trace, Resemblance, and Code 98 4 Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and the Supplementary Economy of the Likeness (Ebenbild) 115 5 Defamatory Images: Disfiguration in Physiognomy and Caricature’s Two Bodies 132 6 Cult Images: Iconoclastic Controversy, the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization 184 7 Angels: Images of Making-Appearance between Religion, Art, and Science 216 8 Perspectives of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture 278 Notes 289 Bibliography 333 Index 361